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“... George F. Woodberry (another English humorist, D. B. Wyndham-Lewis, has his entries indexed under Percy Wyndham Lewis). The genuine Wodehouse entries are not really vintage, which may well be the result of trying to find unhackneyed passages. Indeed, the search for the unhackneyed has cast something of a blight over the book. Though some very civil views are ...”

“... explanation, and an attempt to provide it has been made by Elizabeth Wirth Marvick, in The Young Richelieu. The attempt is bravely made, and it rests on solid archival research in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Archives, the British Library and other places. Yet, though the attempt to provide a psychological explanation of Richelieu and his family ...”

“... some extremely obscure (Philonis, Aristomachus), or unnamed and possibly nameless: ‘Wife’, ‘Young Man’, ‘the heroines at Pylon’, ‘the hero at the tower’. You could argue that heroes are a separate category from gods, especially Olympian gods, but the boundaries are sometimes blurry. One of the favourite themes of Athenian vase-painters in the ...”

“... Royal, but her sights were set on London. Quite how worldly she had been in her early years, when Percy was the most successful tragedy of the time, and her closest friends were the actor David Garrick and his wife, Eva, was the cause of some dismay to sober-minded Evangelicals. But Roberts had an answer to that. He was not offering ‘a perfect specimen of ...”

“... of a fugitive which actually took place on board the clipper ship Cutty Sark, the tale is of a young mate accused of murder who swims to the narrator’s ship in the gulf of Siam (where the twins come from) and is harboured by him and put off for shore when the chance comes. The two young men have fascinated critics and ...”

“... map available was of Palestine. In 1856 the Salisbury Diocesan Training College, which prepared young women to teach in Anglican schools, gave them a lesson plan on the Dead Sea which warned of the danger of being overwhelmed by sand or the salty sea. This was more than a decade before the intrepid Thomas Cook organised the first package tour of the Holy ...”

“... Ebi Bafa, a Nigerian textile saleswoman who envies her neighbour’s ‘Jimmy Shoes’, beats her young husband for reading Playboy, and flirtatiously offers her listeners a discount. In Caroline Bergvall’s monologue Alysoun Sings (2019), meanwhile, she summons a chorus of ‘gabfull women’, from Christine de Pizan and Hildegard of Bingen to Valerie ...”

“... going to the victory feast in Hall. Put on at the last moment, it was not well attended and John Young had invited half a dozen representatives of the lower tables to swell our party ... Roast duck and mulberry tart were the chief dishes and there was champagne. My place was third from the oriel window on the west side of the table between Holmes and ...”

“... as wilful – on the contrary, the misbehavers had their counterparts in the horde of priggish young who set about eroding the turpitude of wicked adults, as in the magazine story of 1827 called ‘The Pious Girl and her Swearing Father’: judging by her clinging attitude (she is illustrated with both arms clasped around his neck), he had plenty to swear ...”

“... It is a commonplace that Brookner writes better about women than about men, as the unhappy Lewis Percy testified. The men in Brief Lives are important but they are kept in their right place, which for Brookner is the background, and as background figures they are perfectly convincing. Owen is beautiful, eager to escape from his over-loving mother, bored with ...”

“... who was otherwise a great supporter of the secret services, could disagree so strongly with Percy Cradock, Chairman of the JIC, over his assessment of Gorbachev. To Cradock he represented the old threat of Communism, which could only be met by force, but to Thatcher he represented the transition to market capitalism, and was ‘a man we can do business ...”

“... emotional demands that inspired a now celebrated diary entry of 1935: ‘I want to love a strong young man of the lower classes and be loved by him and even hurt by him. That is my ticket.’ This is a mood to be remembered when we think of Forster as almost comically mild, so that Lytton Strachey labelled him ‘the taupe’ and Virginia Woolf wished he ...”

“... sorts of games one can play with it to wake people up. This somewhat cosmetic approach to keeping young occurs elsewhere than in these essays. Thus in the admirable book on Kipling there suddenly comes: ‘We owe great debts to Henry James, to Percy Lubbock, to F.R. Leavis, but we have moved away to use, if we wish, fable ...”

“... measurement was only 31, a fact which did not dismay her, as she intended to marry one of three young men out of her extensive acquaintance who happened to find themselves drawn to boyish figures, and although she did not know about such things as precisely as did her aunt, Dorothy knew well enough that her hipless and breastless shape would always attract ...”

“... The story opens on a picture of a very large young lady, ‘a truly massive young person’, crossing from one house to another in Newport, Rhode Island, site of ‘florid’ villas and other structures ‘smothered in senseless architectural ornament’. On the verandah of the second house she finds her father, an inordinately rich man, sourly awaiting the death of his former partner, a slightly less rich man ...”